Western Digital has announced its fastest My Book external hard drive ever produced. The new drive is called the My Book VelociRaptor Duo and uses a pair of 10,000 RPM 1 TB hard drives combined with Thunderbolt technology. The combination of Thunderbolt and 10,000 RPM hard drives gives incredible speed for data access and incredible speed for connectivity between the drive and the computer.

The 2TB external solution includes a pair of Thunderbolt ports and Western Digital says that the high-capacity and fast drive is ideal for editing high-resolution video, 3-D rendering, graphic design, and other performance demanding digital media applications. The dual disc external hard drive provides data transfer rates of up to 400 MB/s.

The drive supports both RAID 0 and RAID 1 for performance or data protection. The dual Thunderbolt ports allow the user to daisy chain multiple VelociRaptor Duo drives or other high-performance peripherals without affecting performance.

"The My Book VelociRaptor Duo is the fastest and most reliable high performance consumer storage device on the market today," explains Jody Bradshaw, senior director of WD's consumer storage solutions group. "Creative professionals now have access to a super-charged storage drive that will keep pace with even the most demanding projects. Daisy-chaining multiple My Book VelociRaptor Duo devices together offers even greater speed, more capacity and flexibility."

The drive also supports JBOD option for users are running Windows on a Mac computer. The drive comes out-of-the-box ready for work with Apple Time Machine and is HFS+ Journaled for Mac computers.

The drive is available in select retailers and online now for $899.99.

I can see where this has an application in the business world, absolutely.Specifically I can see this working for large file transfers across sites with undersized wan's, or limiting downtime.

Consider machine images and deployment on critical machines where downtime int he minutes costs dearly. If you can backup or deploy with locally connected devices you can ensure your more critical machines are back up in 5 minutes instead of 20. If it's a server or central hub that could mean an extra 15 minutes of productivity for the 5 people waiting on it. Maybe it's a machine used in medical or the banking fields.

Maybe you need offline images of multiple machines, if it's 5 minutes a box and you have 10 to backup this saves quite the time.

SSD is awesome for a work drive and multiple users pulling small files. This however has high raw sequential reads and writes. If you need large transfers to and from machines in a short period of time, then yea this is a better value than ssd's per gb of storage.

If it doesn't make sense to you then neither does the price tag. For 2tb of enterprise quality storage in the fastest form available and more portability than a tape based solution, this might work.